November 8, 2016

Some Election Day headlines for sentencing fans ... (to read while waiting in line to vote?)

I am about to head out to vote, and I have the great fortune (and white privilege?) of a local polling place where there is almost never a line to impede or slow down my voting efforts. (And this year I have the extra excitement of getting to see one of my teenagers serving as a poll worker. I am so very proud of her willingness to go through the local training and get up at 5am this morning in order to help everyone have an easy and smooth experience exercising the franchise.)

I am certain that starting this evening I will be blogging about results of key elections for those interested in sentencing reform (as partially previewed here), though I fear it will not be until Wednesday until we know about all the big initiative votes in California because polls there do not close until 11pm EST. Before that time, though, I am hopeful we might have a sense of the outcomes of the big marijuana reform votes on the East Coast (especially in Florida, Maine and Massachusetts) and also of the death penalty votes in the Heartland (Oklahoma and Nebraska).

In the meantime, I have collected here some headlines and links to stories that provide a kind of Election Day starter. Though I sincerely hope readers do not experience long lines or waits to vote, perhaps these stories can help some pass the time:

Comments

We also elect sheriffs and (in some areas) chiefs of police. The desire to elect folks is a vestigial remnant of the Jacksonian movement in the 1800s. A good argument can be made for a more centralized executive branch with most key posts being appointed. Appointed does not guarantee better quality of the officials serving in these roles but it does reduce role of partisanship and gives a chance for the appointing official to look for quality.

On the more particular issue, significance of coroner depends on their actual role. In several states (mine included), sheriff's deputies are automatically treated as deputy coroners, and most crime scene investigations are conducted by the police with the coroner merely signing off on the death certificate after the medical examiner does the autopsy.

Posted by: tmm | Nov 8, 2016 1:32:33 PM

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